I was wondering if I am the only one who can get dexadrine in a 5 mg tablet only. My daughter finds it hard to swallow 2 1/2 pills. Does dexadrine come in a higher dosage in the States? Also in the past few days when she is on meds, I have noticed some odd hand and finger movements? She will be doing her homework and tap her arm, the pencil, her face, rub her fingers? Could this be from the meds?
Re: Dexadrine
I don’t know how dexadrine comes but the hand movements you are talking about sound like self stimulation which is what ADHD kids do.
Re: Dexadrine
It might also be a motor tic — stimulants can uncover tics in susceptible persons. Check with your doctor.
Andrea
Making Sense of Making Sense of Ritalin
by Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD 1/19/00 ©
With publication of Making Sense of Ritalin, author, John Pekkanen, and the Reader’s Digest (January, 2000, page 158) have joined in, in aiding and abetting a fraud. When will the media wake up? Or, is it that they cannot bite one of the biggest hands feeding them (think of all the pharm industry ads)? With the epidemic at 6-7 million schoolchildren, not 3 million, as the author writes, and strangely confined to the US, some antennae ought to go up when it is pointed out that the central controversy—still—is whether indisputable evidence can be found to prove that ADHD is a true biological disorder.
Pekkanen first interviewed National Institute of Mental Health researcher, F.Xavier Castellanos. Castellanos and his group found three areas of the brains of children said to have ADHD to be “significantly” smaller than normal children—right prefrontal, cerebellum and the basal ganglia. Jay Giedd, MD, an associate of Castellanos suggests that ADHD may arise from these abnormalities, these areas of shrinkage.
In fact James Swanson, another colleague of Castellano’s presented this data, authored by he and Castellanos, at the November 16-18, 1998, National Institutes of Health, Consensus Conference on ADHD, and just as in this article, let stand the finding of atrophy of these 3 parts of the brain as if it were the long-sought underlying, validating, physical abnormality of ADHD. It was only when I asked Swanson, from an audience microphone, why he had not mentioned in his presentation the fact that the patients in their studies—the same studies referred to in the Reader’s Digest article—had, almost without exception, been on long-term stimulant therapy.
It is only because their was no other physical variable, i.e., physical difference between the ADHD patients in these studies and the normal control subjects, that myself and other have made the point that no conclusion can be reached other than that the long term Ritalin and other amphetamine therapy is the probable cause of the brain atrophy (shrinkage, shriveling) found in the ADHD subject’s brain scans.
Swanson appeared as a speaker at a meeting I was attending in San Diego, that of the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry, March 5-8, 1998. He spoke, among other things, of the MRI brain scan research of Castellanos, et al, and Filipek, et al [29], alleged to show brain atrophy in subjects with ADHD, but not in controls.
I spoke from the audience, pointing out that 93% of the subjects in the Castellanos studies had been on chronic stimulant therapy, and inquired as to the stimulant status of those in the Filipek study. Swanson acknowledged that Filipek et al, also utilized ADHD subjects who had been on chronic stimulant therapy—an acknowledgment nowhere to be found in reviews of this research either in the in the Lancet [26] or in the more recent Report of the Council of Scientific Affairs of the American Medical Association . Why is it that their lectures, review articles and the abstracts of their research papers never say anything about the ADHD subjects being on Ritalin or any one or several confounding psychotropic drugs? Just why is that?
Here, we had strong, replicated evidence that chronic stimulant therapy (methylphenidate, amphetamine) causes brain atrophy, not confirmation of an ADHD phenotype at all, as we were led to believe.
Next—and much to my surprise—came the answer to the AD/HD “disease”/ “no disease” question.
Swanson (from the tape recording of the session):
“I would like to have an objective diagnosis for the disorder (ADHD). Right now psychiatric diagnosis is completely subjective…We would like to have biological tests—a dream of psychiatry for many years… I think we will validate it. I do not think these drugs are dangerous or addictive when used this way.”
“I think we will validate it,” he said. At long last—an open, honest, truly scientific appraisal from one within the ADHD industry!
On May 13, 1998, Castellanos (NIMH) wrote to me: “…I have noted your critiques of the diagnostic validity of ADHD. I agree that we have not yet met the burden of demonstrating the specific pathophysiology that we believe underlies this condition. However, my colleagues and I are certainly motivated by the belief that it will be possible in the near future to do so.” (see the Castellanos letter of confession on my we site: ). Swanson thinks “we will validate it!” Castellanos and his colleagues are “… motivated by the belief that it will be possible in the near future to do so.”
They know better than most that their brain scan literature allows for one conclusion and one conclusion only, that being that the drugs they urge as “mandatory” and “humane” treatment for 6-7 million, until-then, normal children in the US, are, themselves, the cause of the brain atrophy. Nor does the research of Schweitzer validate ADHD as a disease or a syndrome with a confirmatory abnormality.
In a shot-gun approach, all manner of biological claims are made. At one time or another all of the pseudo-diseases of biological psychiatry have been claimed to be “genetic”, always without proof. The claim that ADHD is due to a defect in the genes: and ADHD genotype, is no less fraudulent, rendering fraudulent, as well, their regular claims of the accompanying ADHD phenotype. Nor do the anecdotes or psychopharm best sellers, substitute for science. Nor do normals respond differently to Ritalin than those in the ADHD group (likely because all of them are normal—until the Ritalin is begun, that is).
Since when are behavior problems at home and school medical problems? How else is one to act with no alternative to the failing, dysfunctional, monopolistic schools of the country, blaming the victims for their own failure? And a healthy market for blaming it is—for the learning disabilities A-Z and the disruptive behavior disorders (DBDs)—ADHD, conduct disorder—CD, and oppositional defiant disorder—ODD.
Noted researcher (in something not yet validated) Russell Barkley, has no trouble seeing ADHD; he sees the US as being ahead in psychiatric research, he sees the Ritalin treatment of ADHD as the medical triumph of the century. He worries over the trivialization of Barkley’s disease, by those skeptical over want of a confirmatory abnormality in children who otherwise appear to be strikingly normal.
As for the nonsensical epidemiology of the “disease”, might the frequency be higher the greater the number of teachers who have deputized “ADHD diagnosticians”?
Dr. Joseph Biederman, yet another researcher into this disease yet in need of validating, states, interestingly enough that he’s found “absolutely no evidence” in his studies that youngsters treated with stimulants become teenage substance abusers. This is very cute indeed. As a scientist and academic, Dr. Biederman knows full well that he has an obligation to impart the results of all of the science, not just that small part that he personally contributes.
With this little semantic stratagem he nicely avoided the most incriminating and impressive study of all, that of Dr. Nadine Lambert, of the University of California at Berkeley, by far the biggest, longest-running of such studies, which leaves no doubt that childhood use of Ritalin and other CNS stimulants (amphetamines mostly) is significantly and pervasively implicated in the uptake of regular smoking, in daily smoking in adulthood, in cocaine dependence, and in lifetime use of cocaine and stimulants.
Barkley’s final word is yet another bit of semantic legerdemain: “But once convinced of an ADHD diagnosis, there’s no compelling reason to avoid Ritalin”. What he and all ADHD experts never say is “once a confirmatory abnormality is found in the child”—”once the diagnosis is proven”. ADHD experts never say such things. Their “diseases” are theories in perpetuity. As long as they are believed and as long as the drugs are prescribed, that’s all that matters.
The diagnosis of ADHD and the prescription of Ritalin, far from being an effective, even legitimate medical endeavor, is fraud and child abuse on a scale so grand as to make it the greatest health care fraud of the past century, and this. And our own federal government, via the public schools of the nation is mandating that the children be “treated” mandating it or the parents will be declared negligent and will lose custody of the normal child—their normal child.